Literature

On her first day at an American high school, the protagonist of my novel, Hira, faces a dilemma. She considers herself well-read, but as she rifles through a thick textbook in her English Literature class, she realizes that none of the American authors in there are familiar to her. It is 2010, and she has

“All worlds, fabricated or not, are equally real. And so they are equally unreal,” says Agnes, the narrator of The Book of Goose. Yiyun Li’s newest novel is a propulsive and provoking exploration of what it means to create a world through words—not only that, but what it means to co-create. The Book of Goose

A major part of my life before turning to writing was my immersion in classical music. I trained to become a professional violist, and performed in orchestra and chamber music groups for years. Although I ended up on a different professional path, classical music infuses my writing and provides the soundtrack for my prose. My

Only an Oil Tycoon Could Ruin This Friendship Adam Soto Share article Wren & Riley Wren was leaving New York to live in Wyoming with a white man named Riley. Yessenia and Junip, her friends and business partners, told her not to go. Not because Riley was white but because it was Wyoming. “I mean,

In Emi Yagi’s Diary of a Void, Shibata, a Japanese woman in her thirties, has had enough of making coffee, doing menial tasks, and enduring sexual harrasment at her workplace and declares that she is pregnant. This announcement results in an immediate turn of affairs, namely her being treated much better by her co-workers since

Jordan Peele is an increasing rarity in Hollywood: a writer-director of original genre films who releases box office smashes every few years. He does what op-ed columnists and anonymous studio execs tell us is impossible: get people in theater seats. If you have somehow not seen Peele’s latest, Nope is a neo-Western that explores visibility

On the Eighth Day God Attended a Writing Workshop God Joins a Writing Workshop and the Old Testament Critique Doesn’t Go Well Jason (workshop leader): God, do you want to start by reading a few pages? Maybe get to Wednesday or Thursday of creation and stop there. God clears Their throat, reads. Jason: Thanks, God.

Before my online life orbited around Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, my imaginative play centered on being Mary-Kate and Ashley. The twins were girls like me, except cuter and blonde. A bit older. Certainly smaller, but still, larger than life. They were influencers before the advent of social media. Their empire was built upon their ability

The poems of Chen Chen’s debut collection When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities possessed the color and intimacy of late-night gossip. Nothing seemed off limits: There were porn stars, superheroes, Kafka references, sometimes all within the same poem.  Your Emergency Contact Has Experienced an Emergency feels even more

For me, summer is a complicated season. As a perpetual student, summers have always been a release from the confines of a busy semester. In the thick of papers to grade, my own dissertation to write, assignments piling up, I often think that if I just make it to summer, I will be fine. Summer

Ling Ma is one of my favorite writers. Her work is exuberantly uncanny, funny, and full of unexpected emotion. In the middle of amusement or joy or strangeness, Ma will catch you with a shock of familiar grief, a well of deep and personal feeling. Every time I read her work, I realize how insufficient

When my father died by suicide in 2008, I was unexpectedly flung into a personal investigation of his death, and also of the legacy of suicide within my ancestral line. His marked the third suicide in my immediate family: both of my grandfathers had also died by their own hand, a truth that my parents

An Underage Chauffeur Clocks in at Last Call Bojan Louis Share article A New Place to Hide by Bojan Louis There is only one way to happiness and that is to cease worrying about things which are beyond the power of our will. Epictetus When I began driving illegally, as a sort of amateur chauffeur,

Meghan Gilliss’ debut novel Lungfish follows Tuck, her husband Paul, and their toddler Agnes as they all squat on Tuck’s dead grandmother’s island in the Gulf of Maine after running out of money. While Paul undergoes substance withdrawal in the rustic house, Tuck and Agnes survive on whatever the intertidal zone offers up that day—purple

Being human—especially as defined and policed these days (clearly, only certain humans are granted full rights)—is rarely enough for those of us who find ourselves on the margins. As a queer writer of mixed Cherokee and Euroamerican descent, I often reach toward speaking with and alongside plants, animals, topographies, and atmospheres—my “queer kin,” as feminist

The old reading room in Irvington, New York was a glorious Gilded Age folly, filled with heavy wooden furniture cracked by decades of use, opalescent turtleback Tiffany lamps, a card catalog the size of a small car, and piles upon piles of dust. History, constrained safely in the pages of old and untouched books, went

I Am Dionysus Fresh Out of Rehab i admit it i’ve never seen a falling star that isn’t a metaphor. i miss each flicker the way you skirt a train just in time to pillage what’s left behind: crushed coins tucked for luck, to flip or plink a tip. whether wishes squeezed from zinc or

If you follow any writers or readers on social media, you’re probably familiar with the artwork of Christine Rhee. Earlier this year, I started seeing reposted images of Penguin Classics with quippy, tongue-in-cheek celebrity photos. A Property Brother on the cover of Dickens’ Bleak House. Julia Fox smiling maniacally on the cover of Bulgokov’s The